If you work in advertising or entertainment, you know how merger headlines and AI announcements land. Not as brilliant business strategy. As a question: what happens to the people who make the work?
As the Wall Street Journal noted last year, the early impact of AI wasn’t about some distant superintelligence, it was about something far more immediate: platform-level control of advertising and distribution.(1)
What felt directional in 2024 has only accelerated since. Platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon continue to collapse creation, testing, optimization, and placement into closed-loop systems reshaping not just how work is produced, but who controls performance, scale, and outcomes.
The shift isn’t that AI can help generate copy or images. It’s that platforms are building end-to-end ad machines. Systems that create, test, optimize, and place ads inside a single closed loop.
Google’s Performance Max. Meta’s Advantage+. Amazon’s creative tools. These aren’t experiments. They’re early versions of a bigger direction: you give them basic inputs (images, video, headlines, voice), they generate variations, automatically select what performs, and distribute across properties with massive data advantage.
That integration matters. No standalone agency can replicate the combination of billions of users, decades of behavioral data, built-in distribution, and automated optimization. Performance reinforces the model. When platforms report lifts that make it rational for advertisers to shift spend, the flywheel turns.
Because it threatens a specific career employment structure. The one where agencies, studios, and production ecosystems employed large creative workforces to develop, craft, and produce at scale.
Platform-level automation doesn’t just reduce time and cost. It displaces parts of the creative supply chain: copy, editing, translation, voice, photography, video production. Even adjacent creative labor like commercial acting, VO work, stock imagery becomes vulnerable when AI generates “good enough” assets quickly and cheaply, and platforms deploy them instantly.
Creativity doesn’t disappear. But institutional demand for large numbers of creative roles can shrink. That’s the uncomfortable part.
The most helpful response isn’t panic. It’s adaptation. Work has been disrupted, re-skilled, and reorganized before. The fundamentals that helped people navigate past shifts still apply:
Lifelong learning: Tools change. The ability to learn does not.
Problem-solving: The most resilient creatives aren’t asset makers. They’re meaning makers who clarify, simplify, and persuade. The message is still what matters.
Value creation: If AI learns from what humans made, humans still shape what comes next by choosing what’s worth making.
There’s a practical structure creatives in both advertising and entertainment already know: the movie crew network. It’s not new, but it’s gaining traction as professionals start trusting themselves more than institutions.
Small teams assemble around a project. Bring in specialist talent as needed. Ship the work. Disperse. Recombine for the next one.
This structure is more resilient than relying on a single corporate arrangement. It’s often more creatively freeing. But it requires investing in your network. Building it. Maintaining it. Showing up. Because people hire people.
AI will change who gets hired, what gets outsourced, and what production looks like. But it won’t change the human need to feel something, trust something, and believe something.
The creative class isn’t ending. It’s evolving. Just like it always has.
It’s reorganizing away from permanent institutions and toward adaptable networks, new business models, and people who keep learning, keep solving, and keep making work that matters.
This is the same strategic lens we bring to companies navigating platform shifts, new technologies, and changing buyer behavior.
Want to talk about what this means for your business? Connect with Steve Facini at [email protected]
(1) Rajeev Kohli, “The AI Revolution Is Coming for Advertising,” Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2024.
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